336 million abortions under China's one-child rule

More than half a billion birth control operations, including at least 336 million abortions, have been performed in the name of the one-child policy, China's health ministry said on Friday.

The figure illustrates the enormous impact that the policy has had in the four decades since it began.

Official statistics showed that in addition to the terminations, Chinese doctors had sterilised 196 million men and women since 1971.

Most people in China support the one-child policy, believing that the country would have suffered an impossible drain on food and resources without it, according to a 2008 survey by the Pew Research Centre, which found more than three in four Chinese in favour.

There are more than 13 million abortions a year, or 1,500 an hour, in China, according to government researchers, who blame a lack of sex education. The population is more than 1.3 billion.

Fewer than ten percent of sexually active couples regularly use condoms, according to the state-run Science and Technology Research Institute.

China's demographics have been dramatically skewed by strict family planning. Last year, the working age population shrank for the first time in 50 years, a serious threat in an economy built on cheap labour.

The incoming Chinese leadership has already moved to dismantle the Family Planning Commission, which has enforced the one-child policy, sometimes brutally.

"We need to find a new family planning policy to fit with the times," said Huang Jiefu, a former vice minister at the health ministry, after seeing the commission merged into the ministry.

"Where else in the world can you find a family planning bureau? It was quite appropriate to fold it into the ministry," he added.

Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing, told The Wall Street Journal that the government had begun the process of ending the policy.

Government officials have said the merger will not affect this year's family planning targets. But Wang said their denials were "a measure to save face".

"The National Population and Family Planning Commission was created for a single mandate of controlling population growth and now they no longer have that, those powers have been dissolved.

"What the government is doing is a major political move and they cannot make or announce all the policy changes that go along with it in one day."